A control system is typically used for obtaining efficient and safe operation of a facility and/or for provision of information regarding a facility. To provide these objectives a control system may be adapted to monitor, analyse and manipulate the facility under control and to communicate information associated with the facility to an operator. In a typical modern control system at least part of the control function is computerised.
Examples of the facilities to be controlled by a control system include various industrial facilities. An industrial facility may be a manufacturing and processing system such as a chemical or petroleum plant, a pulp and/or paper mill, a steel and/or metal plant, a factory or other production facility. Examples of other facilities, without being limited to these, include arrangements such as traffic or storage management systems, communication systems, buildings and other constructions and so on. The term facility shall also be understood to refer to any subsystem e.g. in an industrial plant. A subsystem may be e.g. a manufacturing cell, a group or equipment, a machine or a process stage and so on.
For the provision of the control functions a control system typically comprises equipment such as data processing means, different information collecting and other monitoring means (e.g. different sensors, meters) and so on. A control system may also comprise means for providing communication media between various entities associated with the system.
A control system may be adapted to generate various messages to be communicated between various entities such as a data processing unit and a user terminal. The messages may concern various events associated with the facility to be controlled. For example, a message such as an alarm may be transmitted in response to an event such as a detected abnormality in an entity of the facility monitored by the control system.
The control system may communicate the messages to at least one operator of the facility via an appropriate communication media. The communication may be controlled by a messaging system. The messaging system may be especially important in applications wherein the operator is allowed to move around. That is, the operator may not necessarily be all the time on site and hence he may not be able to observe an operator station at a fixed point. If the operator moves, the communication is preferably arranged to occur via a wireless interface, although communication media that is at least partially based on fixed line communications may also be used. The skilled person is aware of various possibilities for implementing communication between a control system and a user terminal and thus these are not described in more detail herein.
The user terminal may be mobile, preferably portable terminal or a fixedly located terminal. Examples of the mobile terminals comprise, without being limited to these, mobile stations such as mobile telephones, pagers, personal data assistants (PDAs) or organisers, laptop computers and so on. Fixed operator terminals may comprise, without being limited to these, devices such as PC computers or other computer workstations, fax machines, fixed line telephone terminals, printers and so on.
A facility may be operated by several persons. For example, an industrial facility may comprise various components and/or various stages. The operators of the facility may have different responsibilities and/or may be positioned in different locations. The operators may also move and thus their location relative to the facility and/or to each other may vary. A complex system may also comprise a substantially great number of various features to be controlled. The number of different events may also be substantially high in a complex system.
A message associated with a specific entity of the facility should be communicated to an operator who has the responsibility for said entity. It may also be important to ensure that at least one operator receives the message and/or acknowledges the receipt thereof. This is considered to be especially important in complex systems that may be controlled, operated and/or served by a number of operators.
The messaging system should be such that e.g. an alarm message is received and/or acknowledged by at least one operator. However, it may also be advantageous to avoid any unnecessary transmissions to operators who do not necessarily need to receive information about the alarm. Unnecessary communication may need to be avoided e.g. because of capacity limitations of the messaging system. Furthermore, an operator may not be capable of handling more than a certain amount of messages without a risk of being provided with so much information that he/she is no longer able to cope with all received messages.
Conventionally an event related message is communicated to an operator based on information about a beforehand defined relation defined between very specific events and specific operators. That is, a specific alarm signal from e.g. a certain pump triggers a procedure wherein an alarm message is delivered to a beforehand specified address for such alarm messages. The specific recipient may have been associated with an event, a component and so on e.g. by means of a table linking events and recipients in a predefined manner.
Computer aided control systems may be implemented by integrating several different systems in a common framework. The inventors have found that maintenance and operation of such control systems may require more advanced possibilities to select and/or configure information about the recipients of the control messages than what is provided by the prior art arrangements. It might also be advantageous in some occasions if e.g. an operator could readily adjust and/or reconfigure the recipient selection procedure. This could facilitate easier changes in responsibilities and/or in the facility to be controlled. That is, there is a need for a possibility to configure more efficiently which recipient should get messages and also which messages should be sent to a selected recipient.